


A Shameful Display

by PositivelyVexed



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Bondage, Figging, Handcuffs, M/M, One Shot Collection, Period-Typical Racism, Photographs, literal healing cock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:02:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29552517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: A collection of short, mostly unconnected ficlets.
Relationships: Chris Mannix/Marquis Warren
Comments: 5
Kudos: 5





	1. "Don't worry, it'll grow back."

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merryandrew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merryandrew/gifts).



> Thanks to Merryandrew for the encouragement to post these!
> 
> All stories originally written for ffa's 100 Words prompts between 2017-2019. Actual length may vary.

Mannix fell back on the bed, head spinning from the blood loss.

“Fuck, major, it hurts,” he moaned, although the spirit of generosity moved him to add, “Though not like getting my whole goddamn ballsack blown off, probably.”

Warren pursed his lips. “Don’t worry on my ballsack’s account. It’ll grow back.”

“The hell you say?” Mannix had to flip over, to see if it was more apparent from right side up that Warren had lost his goddammed mind. But Warren looked at him the way he held a gun, steady and calm and deadly serious.

“It’s done it before.”

Mannix stared, but Warren gazed steadily back, like he expected him to have some kind of response to that.

“You get your balls shot off often, major?”

“That’s none of your goddamn business, Chris Mannix.”

All the warm feelings he had been feeling towards Warren started to curdle like sour milk. “You got a real low opinion of me if you think I’ll believe a bullshit story like that, major,” he said, not quite able to keep the hurt out of his voice. “I thought you’d think better of me after I just got done ripping Daisy Domergue’s story to shreds to save your life.”

“I do have a low opinion of you, seeing as I've met you. But I know even you know that scrotums, on the whole, don’t grow back. Which is why I’m telling you that mine will. I guess you could call it a gift. Magic, if you believe in that shit, which I don’t.”

A whoop of laughter escaped him so hard his whole body hurt. “Alright, so is this some special African power, or….”

Warren smiled too, but in a way that made him uneasy. “No, you ignorant hillbilly, and how I came by it is also none of your goddamn business.”

“You sure carried on back there like you thought your family jewels was gone forever.”

Warren grimaced. “It still hurts like a motherfucker.”

And maybe it was all the blood that used to be in him that was now seeping through the mattress and onto the floor, but he found himself believing Warren. Which didn’t bode well for his blood-deprived brain, because if there was one thing Warren was, aside from a tough old sonofabitch that you wanted in your corner in a fight, it was an untrustworthy lying bastard.

“You probably just want me picturing that cock of yours one more time before I bleed out,” Mannix muttered. Warren raised his eyebrows at him, like maybe that had implied a level of interest he didn’t have. ”I meant since you seem to love to talk about it.”

Warren looked all amused. “Suit yourself, Chris Mannix.” He closed his eyes.

“It suits me to declare you fuller of shit than a privy at the county fair.” But then there was that feeling Warren gave him, the same one he got when Warren had given his gun to him, like he was falling into place without knowing he’d fallen. “You are full of shit, right, major?” he asked.

Warren quirked an eye open, shrugged, and shook his head. “Not this time.”

He fell back on the bed, and stared up at the ceiling, just kind of percolating in that final kick in the head this night had delivered.

“Hey, major?” he said after a spell. “You think those healing powers might rub off on someone?”

“Like syphilis?”

He scowled, but Warren didn’t seem put out by it. “Might be it would. I’d allow you to try, if you like,” he said.

He glanced at Warren’s blood-caked trousers, fascination and repulsion and--goddammit--desire twisting his stomach into all kinds of knots. “There’ll be hell to pay I find out you were just bullshitting me to get me to do this,” he warned.

But Warren just told him not to flatter himself and get to it if he was going to get to it.

So he undid Warren’s trousers, his blood weakly rushing to the juncture of his legs as he fumbled with blood slicked buttons. Mannix never did anything in half-measures, and If he was going to die in disgrace, he might as well go all in. He lowered his head.

But it turned out he didn’t die, disgraced though he surely was.

Damned if that lying bastard wasn’t telling the truth.


	2. Second Chances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sequel.

Mannix woke up with a bitter taste in his mouth and a clean white scar on his thigh where the bullet had been. He parted the bloodstained bullethole in his pants leg to get a better look, squinting in the low winter light. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said. He slapped his other thigh and all but grinned at the corpses scattered around the room, and then his sight felt on the man snoring softly next to him on the bed. The whoop of triumph died in his throat, as everything he had done last night to earn his miraculous survival slunk back into his memory.

He stuck out his tongue and tried to scrape the taste off with his fingertips. Warren stirred and looked up at him with infinite weariness, “Jesus fucking Christ. You still here?”

“Guess so.”

“Must have been addled-brained from the blood loss last night, letting you put your mouth on me. Still, suppose there’s some value in knowing the extent of my spunk's powers.”

“As I recall, I’m the one figured it out.”

Warren peered at him speculatively. “That’s true, another man might not have made that leap from healing powers to cocksucking. You figured it out real quick, though. Someone might take that for actual interest in the subject.”

“Shit, major, I was dying. Don’t take it for more than it’s worth.”

That exchange put him in a bit of a mood as he staggered out of bed, especially when Mannix remembered that he couldn’t even make any fucking coffee and kicked the pot across the room and into the wall for good measure. Then he remembered how unlikely it was that he should be alive at all to be kicking coffee pots around and he couldn’t help but grin a bit at Warren.

“Fine day to be alive, isn’t it?”

Warren was fussing with his coat, stained through as it was with blood, but he looked up to say, “Every day’s a fine fucking day for that.”

The two of them made light work of hauling the late Domingre gang into the stagecoach. He didn’t even quarrel when Warren insisted on bringing John Ruth down off the mountain, out of some professional courtesy or slantwise sentimentality, and after that they both agreed that it seemed like poor form to leave O.B. there all by himself, what with him being the one soul out of the bunch who had never deserved any of this, and it being his stagecoach and all, so in he went, till the coach was so packed with the dead they could almost stand up without falling over.

The two of them stood a bit in the snow then, blood-splattered coats flapping like flags in the wind, almost but not quite leaning against each other for support, because they needed a bit of a rest and it seemed natural enough, not that either would acknowledge it. Warren had worked himself into a sour mood over the ruined Lincoln letter, but Mannix wasn’t going to let that asshole dampen his spirits any.

“Major, I don’t know what the fuck happened last night, but being alive, with enough bounties that we could both retire? Hell, you couldn’t ask for a better outcome, and you got your pecker sucked on top of that.”

Warren’s mouth tightened. “I’ve had better on that count.”

He remembered Warren’s moans telling a different story the night before. “Well I sure don’t care about that. My interest in your pecker extends to saving my life.”

“That why you still bringing it up?”

The skin of his face felt tight and hot, all the more so because Warren’s eyes on him made his hands twitch, but not in the direction of his gun like they really ought to at an insinuation like that.

“Because I think I did pretty good under the circumstances, what with the blood and all. Most folks wouldn’t--”

“That’s one thing you’re right about, most folks wouldn’t at all under those circumstances. You’re one of a kind, Chris Mannix.”

The memory of the blood and heat on his tongue returned. He had already well and truly crossed the line against any measure of dignity or decency, and it occurred to him that that meant there was no point not crossing it again if he felt like it. And, he shifted uncomfortably, supposing he did feel like it.

“Now that’s where you’re wrong. You like that shit too. You can’t tell a story like you told last night with all that color about bloody throats and pretend otherwise this morning. Now I know I did a better job than you let on, certainly better than Chester Charles Smithers, but if you want to insist otherwise, maybe you’ll let me prove myself again.”

Mannix was gratified to see all that smugness startled right out of Warren's eyes for a moment. Then Warren shrugged, like he was the one being magnanimous. The huskiness in his voice gave him away, though, as Mannix dropped to his knees right there in the snow. “Well. Seems like a good day for second chances at any rate. Even undeserved ones. Just don't spoil it.”

It seemed to him that neither of them deserved it, all things considered, but he wasn’t inclined to waste it.


	3. Bondage

Sometimes he puts him in irons. It starts off as a sudden impulse, finding the manacles there at the bottom of his saddlebag one day, and tells him to come over. Mannix pulls up short when he sees what he means to do.

“Oh come on, major. You can't be serious.”

“I surely am. Now turn around.”

It seems to shame him more than anything else they do together, which is saying something. That would be reason enough to keep doing it, the significance not lost on either of them when Mannix kneels at his feet with his hands chained behind him, flexing his wrists, trying to keep his head down so that the shame burning his face isn’t quite so obvious.

“I’d kill you for this if I were free.” He makes an amusing picture, shirt all askew and hair a mess, breathing heavy like a caught animal, knees dusty from crawling across the floor. It's amusing enough that Warren isn’t immediately exasperated by the amount of bullshit Mannix tends to spew when he’s like this.

Warren has only to lift his boot between Mannix’s legs, where his cock is as hard as a broom handle and just as hard to miss. Mannix shudders when the toe of Warren’s boot taps him there, a deep full body tremble, and shoots a glance at his pecker like it's personally betrayed him.

“I can tell how much you hate it. You gonna fight me over it, Chris Mannix? Fight for the right to be free from bondage?"

"Now you know I didn't mean anything like that," Mannix says, thrown a bit off-kilter, like he knows he's walked into something he didn't mean to.

But Warren's impatient today, so he just says, "Then why don't you show me what you meant."

By way of answer, Mannix puts his mouth on him right through his trousers, the warmth sinking through the wool. He takes him by the hair automatically, and pulls him close, letting him chafe his lips on his trousers a bit more before he pulls his cock out, and Mannix closes his lips around him. Mannix is still ashamed of himself, and maybe if Warren were inclined to that sort of thing, he'd be too. But he never gave a damn for shame. When he’s done, he closes the front of his trousers and throws himself into a chair and picks up a book, leaving Mannix all red-lipped and frustrated, still chained up on the floor.

“You gonna help me out here?” he asks impatiently. "Keeping me like this ain't right."

"The more opportunities you give me to savor the irony of the present situation, the longer you gonna go before I unchain you."

Mannix cusses at that, but it's all music to his ears.


	4. Photos

“Anyone ever tell you fellas you make quite the picture together?”

“No, think you must be the first.”

The boy with the camera kept on hopping along beside them, trying to keep his tripod from dragging, making eager eyes that wouldn’t be deterred. “What do you say? Get your photo taken for a Times-commissioned series on the pioneers of the New West? You might get published in the papers.”

He should have said no, they were in a hurry. Bounty money was burning holes in their pockets and he wanted a drink. Should have said no, because Mannix was wearing that goddamn general's coat, and he had some notion of how folks would take that. Not that folks wasn't liable to make foolish assumptions about just who outranked who wherever they went, but it was easier to set them straight in person.

Anyhow, he could see the picture they formed for the cameraman working through his face, clear as day: black man and white man, the blue and the gray, posed together real friendly-like. No hard feelings, we've come so far. Like they were the very symbol of racial reconciliation. Fuck that shit. There were still days he thought about spilling Mannix’s blood all over the hotel room when they woke, even if he couldn't offhand think of the last time that had been.

But Mannix, who wouldn’t know a symbol if it stuck its hands down his pants and said howdy, had already stopped.

“Now that don’t seem fair, us just giving away our likeness for nothing. Wouldn’t make us any kind of businessmen.”

“Well I can’t pay you,” the boy said, affronted.

“Then how about giving us a copy to keep, free of charge? That sound like a fair deal to you, major?”

The way Mannix was making eyes at that camera like a kid staring at a jar of pepperrmint sticks should have made him refuse on principle.

But, hell, he never had his picture taken before. And there was a part of him that had always liked the idea--carrying around a little sliver of himself, untouched by time. He liked too the idea of all the sow-eyed white folks back east looking at their picture and never guessing the half of how it really was between the two of them.

And then there was the chance, however slim, of that photograph landing under the eyes of one of the Mannix clan, being numerous as the descendants of Abraham like they were. He wondered if Mannix had thought of that. He wondered if he cared.

He shrugged. “You publish it, you tell folks that's Major Marquis Warren there, of the Union Cavalry, colored division, and his junior partner, Chris Mannix.”

Chris was so pleased he didn't even scowl at that. The boy started setting up the camera.

Later on, walking back to their hotel, Mannix kept turning over the photo in his hands, so damn proud of it he seemed about on the verge of passing out cigars and brandy over its emergence into the world.

“Now you just try and tell me that wasn’t a great idea. Just look at that. Look how damn good we look.”

He couldn't even disagree, not really. He liked the jaunt in their hips as they leaned back against the hitching rail, Mannix a little in his shadow, coat flaps thrown back to reveal their sidearms, all cool assurance like they might as well have owned this town. He liked the way his eyes stared down the camera, no docile reconciliation to be found there, no sir. Holding still for the camera had even forced Mannix into a different kind of expression: serious, forthright, eyes sharp as knives. It suited him. He still looked ugly, maybe, but not foolish.

What really tickled him, though, was how the camera had caught a shadow of the bruise on Mannix’s cheek, the mark Warren had put there just last night. He had tilted that side of his face to the camera, like the white boy was downright proud of it. He ran his thumb over it, and let a chill travel down his spine, imagining getting back to their room and running his thumb over the real thing.

“Ain’t the worst idea you’ve had.”


	5. Figging

Mannix stood in the center of the room, naked, his hands on the bed frame. He kept throwing nervous glances back over his shoulder. “What’s that for?” he asked.

“I thought you grew up around horses, Chris. You should know.”

“Well, you are the cavalryman, sir, so enlighten me.”

He suspected Mannix did have some idea, but was playing the dumb hillbilly, which had to come second-nature to him. Still, knowing was fine. Let him know. “Sure, Chris. Since it seems to be my lot in life to dispel your ignorance.

“This,” he held up the bulb, freshly skinned, tangy sweet smell on his fingers, “is what you use when you need to put some spring in a horse’s step.”

Mannix bowed his head, and damn if he didn’t spread his fingers a bit against the brass footboard, get ‘em fanned out nice and wide. “That so?”

“Time would come a horse-trader needed to pass off his stock as younger and friskier than they were, he’d use one of these. Peel it, shove it somewhere delicate, let it start burning, and the oldest nag in the stable would be trotting with its tail up like the fanciest showhorse you ever seen. That’s what’s up with the ginger.”

“Fascinating, but we ain’t looking to sell a horse, major,” Mannix said, his voice low. His tongue darted out to touch his lips, and then scurried back like it was afraid to be seen. “We only got the two.”

“Even if we were, I wouldn’t do that cruel shit to any horse of mine.”

Warren touched his ass, felt the muscles tense under his hand.

Mannix took a deep, unsteady breath, let it out inch by ragged inch. Softly, like he couldn’t muster more air, “Yeah. No prize for guessing who you do do that shit to.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he whispered in Mannix's ear, let him shiver from getting his ear tickled. “Some might consider this a hell of a prize.”

“For you or me?”

But his hands stayed on the frame, stayed there with nothing keeping them there but his own damn desire to, and Warren’d swear on a stack of bibles his ass perked up in his hand. Already ready to start leaning over the bed, until he seemed to remember not to, to look like he wasn’t as eager for this as he was. Mannix drummed a quick rhythm on the brass bars. Nervous, or just impatient.

“You got somewhere you’re supposed to be?”

“No, sir.”

He reached down, traced his thumb around the entrance to Mannix’s hole, enjoying the skittish way Mannix tensed under his hand. Plenty frisky for him already, not that he’d say as much. Warren stepped up behind him, boots and spurs jangling on the hardwood floor. Kicked Mannix's legs further apart. Mannix exhaled a bit sharply as he bent him against the bedframe, got the plug of ginger worked up inside him; white boy tensing up--mostly, he suspected, from anticipation and the cool of the juices and the strangeness of the shape. He’d had plenty bigger up inside him.

Warren could see him flexing his ass muscles experimentally when he stepped back.

“That hardly feels like anything,” Mannix said, though he shifted his shoulders, embarrassed.

“It ain’t supposed to, right away,” he said patiently. “It’s what you’d call a slow burn. And in the meantime.”

He pointed to the mattress. Mannix moved, stiffly, like if he shuffled slow and nonchalant enough he could ignore what was up inside him. He got halfway through lifting his leg to climb up on the bed when he froze, went red in the face. He felt it then, shifting inside him.

“Fuck you, major,” he said. Warren laughed.

Mannix’s cane still leaned in the corner. Mannix hadn’t used it for getting around in months, his leg had healed up completely, but he still kept it around anyhow, like some kind of fucked up souvenir, maybe, or maybe he thought it made him look like a goddamn war hero. Anyway, it was still there. Warren crossed the room, took it up, felt the smooth polished weight of it in his hand. Mannix had taken beatings before, hell, they’d started just about as soon as they’d started fucking, but never with this.

Mannix's eyes widened when they fell on that. He opened and closed his mouth, then said, tightly, “They do that to horses too?”

“No, just mouthy white boys. Get that ass up in the air a bit more, that’s right.”

Mannix swallowed, but he did as he was told.

The first time the cane whistled through the air and came down across his ass, the muscles of his ass squeezed together, and a strangled “fuck!” shook out of his throat.

“Starting to get the picture?”

Mannix shot him a look, but settled in, hands clutching at the sheets. He swung the cane again. This time he could see Mannix trying to bear it without tensing up, without squeezing down on that burning bulb that was up inside him, but the pain just made him holler into the pillow.

“No good way to bear it, is there?”

“You're a fucking asshole.“

Warren smiled. He had some fun with him after that, laying heavy strokes, watching Mannix twist under them, getting him all wrung out and burned up from the inside out. Stuck a smaller piece of ginger in the slit of his leaking erection, just to see him sting from both ends, which made tears spring in his eyes, though he did his damnedest to hide that. Warren savored the feel of the heat radiating off that sweat-soaked skin, like he was warming himself by some kind of fire. Maybe the kind Mannix’s people loved so very much. Maybe the kind he lit himself.

When he at last got tired of swinging the cane, Mannix lifted his head weakly out of the sheets. Lips wet and eyes dark. “If you tried to treat either of our horses way you treat me, you’d have got yourself kicked in the head.”

“Just proves they’ve got more sense than you.” He sat down on the bed beside him. Mannix twisted himself around so his head was almost in his lap, nuzzling at the hard-on that was making his pants feel too damn tight. “You look nice though, like this.”

“Yeah?”

He stroked a hand down Chris’s back, to the red stripes laid across his ass. “Yeah.”


	6. losing your keys and being unable to find them

“You can’t find them? For fucking real?”

“For real fucking real.”

“You picked a hell of a way to find out. What are we going to do?” Not waiting around for any kind of answer, Mannix arched his back off the bed and pulled as hard as he could, clanging the cuffs against the metal bars loud enough to wake the entire hotel.

Warren grabbed him tight, stilled him. “Now you know you ain't so uncomfortable that bringing the landlady up here and catching our asses damn near in-fucking-flagrante is going to improve the situation.”

Mannix clenched his teeth. “You fucking put me in handcuffs… and you don’t have the key?”

“The handcuffs were your idea.” Mannix had come across them while cleaning out the saddle bag, had practically sprained something grinning at Warren and raising his eyebrows suggestively as he dangled them from a finger. It was the pair Warren'd kept ever since he started doing bounty work, in the spirit of just in case, you never known. Just in case never did come along, the events at Minnie’s being a damn good example why… so they’d never seen any use before tonight, when he’d been indulgent enough or just stupid enough to snap them on Mannix’s wrists, enjoy the hiss of air escaping through Mannix’s teeth, the way his eyes got a bit unfocused with desire as he pulled against them and found himself well and truly at Warren's mercy.

He really probably should have double-checked to make sure the key was still there at the bottom of the bag, but, hell, they’d both been three sheets to the wind by that point.

Now with the afterglow of sex and whiskey fading, leaving nothing in their stead but a noisy, panicked white boy in his bed, thrashing his legs like they could make up for the lack of freedom in his arms, he was beginning to regret that unnatural lack of caution that Mannix brought out in him.

He did one last search through the bag, then tossed it across the room, and sat beside Mannix, who was still protesting vociferously that while the handcuffs may have been his idea, spending the night in them sure hadn’t, and grabbed his chin. Not gentle, but firm. “Calm down. I ain’t leaving you for some poor housekeeper to find.”

He held up the prong he’d freed from his belt buckle, so Mannix could see it gleam in the lamplight. “Lucky for you, chains never stopped me before.”

“Sweet merciful Jesus,” Mannix whispered, body going limp as a clubbed fish in relief. He scrambled up into a half-sitting position, twisted himself around to watch with interest as Warren worked at picking the lock. “You pulled that trick at Wellenbeck?”

“Yeah, and when I was fourteen.”

Mannix nodded, slowly, taking that in and thinking through what it meant. He didn’t have anything to say, except a tentative, “Useful skill.”

Warren snorted. “White boys like you didn’t use to think so highly of it.”

That shut him up, and Warren was free to work in peace, save for Mannix following his every move with large, worried eyes. “Dammit," he whispered at last, "The things I let you do to me.” He shook his head, but he said it with something like wonder. Warren wasn't sure he liked it, or maybe he liked it too much. He busied himself with the pick and tried not to smile.


End file.
